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I think what is par­tic­u­lar­ly strik­ing about the ques­tion of dis­pos­able lives in the 21st cen­tu­ry is what seems to be a new glob­al com­mon sense about pover­ty, the ways in which pover­ty and par­tic­u­lar­ly poor oth­ers have become vis­i­ble. And how that in turn, par­tic­u­lar­ly for mil­len­ni­als in the glob­al North, col­lege stu­dents, young pro­fes­sion­als, so-called ordi­nary glob­al cit­i­zens of the world, how this has mobi­lized them to action.

The rec­i­p­ro­cal influ­ence between an entre­pre­neuri­al­ist regime and per­va­sive pre­car­i­ty, their ambiva­lent coex­is­tence, is what the con­cept of the entrep­re­cari­at refers to. To artic­u­late some of the ways in which this mutu­al influ­ence takes place, I’d like to intro­duce what I would call a pos­tu­late of the entrep­re­cari­at. So here it is: The more pre­car­i­ty is present, the less entre­pre­neuri­al­ism is vol­un­tary.

Unfortunately at the moment I think typ­i­cal­ly phil­an­thropy is not being used very effec­tive­ly, and that’s part­ly because of the kind of non-judgmental atti­tude that phil­an­thropy advi­sors and peo­ple gen­er­al­ly have about phil­an­thropy.